Lent in Plain Sight: A Stone
Luke 24:1-12
On Holy Saturday, our church has The Rocky Soil Scripture Show, which is a “rowdy participatory reading” of Mark’s Gospel. What if we also had a costumed Easter Pageant, like many churches do for Christmas? Christmas, of course, includes Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus, plus shepherds, sheep, magi, angels, and a donkey. And, oh yes, maybe a star. An Easter Pageant might include Joseph of Arimathaea and his friend Nicodemus. There would also be Mary Magdalene, a few other women, a couple angels, a gardener (aka Jesus), some soldiers, and the two Resurrection Day racers, Peter and John. In addition to this cast, there would be another character, an inanimate one — not a star, but a stone. The costume designer would have to make an outfit resembling a 3000 pound chiseled disc, about a foot thick and six feet across. Two actors could inhabit it, and maybe turn cartwheels to simulate the rolling stone that covered Jesus’ tomb.
A stone. A tombstone. Not exactly the lead role in the Easter show, but a big part of it, one that is mentioned in all four accounts of that historic day. My bicycle route to work takes me past many tombstones, those that mark the places of the departed in Bayview Cemetery. Those stones invite me to stop, read, and imagine. I imagine the sorrow of the family that lost their infant daughter. I imagine the sacrifice of the nuns who moved to this wild place in 1890 to open a hospital for injured miners and loggers. The stones over those graves invite me stop, read, wonder, and remember.
But this was not the case for the tomb stone in that garden near Golgotha! That stone said STOP! — but not in an invitational way. That stone said to all on the outside: KEEP OUT! That stone said to the one on the inside: STAY IN! The Jewish leaders had that stone secured with a troop of soldiers and the seal of the governor to insure just that. No one could come in and steal Jesus’ body and claim that he had risen. And, just in case Jesus really did rise as he said, he would do so only to die a lonely death shut up in a cave. He wouldn’t get out.
And so we would expect to find Mary Magdalene and her friends fretting that early morning, fretting about who would move the stone.They knew they couldn’t do it. And God knew they couldn’t do it. So Matthew says God sent an earthquake and an angel to move it.
On the day that stone was rolled away, on that resurrection day, C.S. Lewis says, “Something perfectly new in the history of the universe had happened. Christ had defeated death. The door which had aways been locked had for the very first time been forced open” (God in the Dock).
No amount of scheming to keep people out or one person in that tomb could succeed. No troop of invincible soldiers. No seal of inviolable authority. No weight of immovable mass. As Malcolm Muggeridge asserts, “Jesus audaciously abolished death, transforming it from a door that slammed to, into one that opened to, whoever knocked” (Jesus the Man Who Lives).
That stone in Golgotha’s garden graveyard no longer says STOP! — but COME! Come in and see that he whom you seek is not here. He has deserted the place of the dead and entered the land of the living. Jesus says, “Come, walk through that door and enter new life with me. For the stone has been rolled away. Yes, the stone has been rolled away.”